Jewel Sport - KTM 990SMR v Aprilia Dorsoduro

As a time and motion study, jewellery heists are a pretty profitable blag. What do you need? Simple innit, two fast, thuggish supermoto bikes with plenty of V-twin stomp. A KTM 990SMR and Aprilia Dorsoduro should be enough to get the job done

Our bike choice was pretty simple. Aprilia’s sexy new 750cc Dorsoduro and KTM’s brutish 990SMR. The jewellers? Well the capital’s Bond Street seems to be a particular favourite and there’s no better time to strike than right in the wake of a previous robbery. Insurance companies have coughed up, stock has been replenished and although security are jumpy, they’ll always be that way.

So with suitably anonymous clothing and a couple of big stuffa bags and rubber masks, we nipped into W1 to do a little bit of business.

Hacking through grid-locked traffic en-route from our East End lock-up to pay our chosen shop a visit, there’s little to split the two. When the going’s snarly, the super-slim-style Aprilia is the filter-king of the two, dodging, ducking and diving through rows of stationary traffic.

Dorsoduro means hard ridge and it really sums up the Aprilia’s seat rather succinctly.The taller, wider, longer KTM isn’t quite in the same bantam weight league and needs a lot more pre-planning, focus and, it has to be said, confidence. Damn it’s plush and comfy, though.

In fact dodging in and out of traffic queues on the way to the job highlights another KTM trait that takes a little getting used to – fuelling. The part-throttle fuelling manners of the 990SMR demands the utmost accuracy from the rider otherwise things can be a bit lurchy.

The best coping mechanism is to always have two fingers on the clutch to artificially soften the delivery – probably not good news for the clutch plates in the long run, but much better than losing that critical level of fine control.

But as soon as a gap in the traffic opens, the KTM romps ahead again. What a bloody engine. Just instant, grin-inducing thump right from the badoom-badoom tickover straight through to the red-line. In the lower three gears this power delivery is a fast way to looping over backwards if you get a bit giddy with the throttle cables. Much safer to keep throwing gears at it and ride the much safer middle reaches of the torque curve. After all, we don’t want to attract too much attention, do we?